Until Next Time
by Austenwoolf
Summary: A sequel to Waiting, but can be read independently.


Disclaimer: Paramount owns them, and if they had treated them with half the respect they deserved I never would have had to write this.  
  
Note: This is a continuation of the themes in my short story Waiting, but can be read independently. Review: Considering about 60%of my self-esteem is dependent upon it, please do.  
UNTIL NEXT TIME  
  
By Austenwoolf  
"Shore leave is exactly what I need," Deanna said as she stretched with feline grace on her couch.  
  
"I completely agree," replied Beverly who sat, with her feet tucked underneath her, in the chair beside the couch. "It will certainly help with that funk you've been in lately."  
  
"I resent that. I have not been in a funk," Deanna said in a half- hearted attempt at annoyance. Beverly said nothing, just raised her eyebrows in a silent question. "Okay maybe I have been in a bit of a mood lately."  
  
"Now there's the understatement of the century. Do you realize that this is the first time we've gotten together like this in months, and it's been even longer since you went to a poker game. To be honest we were all starting to think you were trying to avoid us."  
  
"I wasn't trying to avoid you, I've just been busy," Deanna avoided the Doctor's gaze as she spoke.  
  
"It's about Tom isn't it?" Beverly's question was so completely unexpected that it took Deanna a moment to compose herself enough to answer.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Do you want to talk about it?"  
  
"Isn't that my line?" she asked with a smile that did not touch her dark eyes. She sobered, "Besides there really isn't much to talk about." "It's over." It was not a question so much as a comment.  
  
"It was over before it even started." Deanna stood up and walked over to the replicator. "Hot chocolate," she ordered. Within moments a cup of steaming liquid appeared of the platform. "Do you want anything?"  
  
"No thank you," Beverly watched Deanna make her way back to the couch and sit down gingerly. Her friend was quite for a moment, deep in thought. Beverly knew how hard these past few months had been on Deanna, even if she had not confided in her as she normally did. In truth Beverly felt a little responsible for the pain Deanna was going through it had been she that had encouraged Deanna to pursue a relationship with Tom, not the she needed much encouraging. Wanting desperately for Deanna to relax and enjoy herself she changed the subject. "So where are you going on shore leave?"  
  
Deanna smiled at the thought of her plans, "Well I am going to a very remote retreat on the planet Vallen. I rented a cabin there next to the ocean, it should be very relaxing."  
  
"It sounds like just what the doctor ordered." Deanna laughed aloud at her friend's incredibly bad joke. "See I knew I could make you smile."  
* * *  
Deanna kept the day and her mind filled with the trivial things that had to be done before she left for shore leave. She had to pack, reschedule appointments, and finish some last minute crew reports. She was right in the middle of debating with herself which bathing suit to take with her when her door chimed. She knew who it was, had in fact been expecting him. It was a ritual for them, when one left the ship for any length of time to spend the last night together, talking, laughing, and just enjoying each other's company. She quelled the rush of happiness at the thought that even know, with all the tension between them, he would still come to her.  
  
She drew a calming breath, "Come in." The door swished open and Will cautiously poked his head in.  
  
"I'm not interrupting you am I?" He asked nervously.  
  
She smiled warmly hoping to ease his tension. It worked, if only for a moment, he matched her smile with one of his own. "Your not interrupting anything, I'm just trying to decide which bathing suit to take with me." She held up the small suits, one in each hand for him to inspect. "What do you think?"  
  
The old Will would have raised his eyebrows and smiled that one- hundred watt smile of his while making a rather explicit comment, but now that old Will seemed a million miles away. "That one," he said pointing to the purple one. She threw it into her Starfleet issue case and shut the lid.  
  
"Can I get you something to drink?" She tried to keep the desperation out of her voice; she missed their late night talks and wished that they could find that balance in their lives again. The tension between them had been subtle, only their closest friends had seen it, but it was enough to throw the equilibrium of their friendship off. In many ways, it reminded Deanna of their first few months aboard the Enterprise, until they had drawn the tentative lines in the sand that dictated their relationship.  
  
No that's okay I cannot stay long. I just wanted to stop by and tell you to have a good time and I'll see you when you get back."  
  
Deanna froze on her way to the replicator, with those words he was continuing another of their unspoken traditions; they never said the words goodbye. It was just a little thing, but he would know how much it meant to her. She slowly turned back to look at him, and for a moment she saw and felt a flash of longing from him so deep it made tears well up in her eyes. She stepped closer, not close enough to make him uncomfortable, but close enough to bask in the warmth of everything he was to her. In his own way he was trying to bridge the chasm between them, and she loved him all the more for the attempt.  
  
"Thank-you," she whispered, "and I will defiantly see you when I get back."  
  
He smiled and stepped out of her quarters with out another word.  
* * *  
Deanna lay in the hammock on the porch of the rented beach house reveling in the warm breeze laden with the scent of the ocean. She had been here for two days and was enjoying the seclusion of this place. It was rare that she got a chance to completely let her shields down and not be bombarded by the one thousand minds, give or take a few hundred, which made up the crew of the Enterprise. The sun was begging to set on the horizon causing bright splashes of pink, purple, and red to dance across the sky. She watched the sun setting, and for the first time in years began to feel lonely. She wistfully looked up at the stars beginning to form in the darker half of the sky and thought about Will wondered what he was doing, if he was safe. Suddenly she realized what she was doing, looking at the stars and thinking of him, just as she had done years ago after he had left her on her home planet. Mildly disgusted with herself for thinking like that she swung out of the hammock and began to walk toward the door. It was then, over the crashing waves of the ocean, that she heard the familiar whine of a transporter beam. She spun around just in time to see the glistening transporter beam deposit its charge on the sand in front of her porch. She looked at the man with a mixture of confusion and anger. "Tom what the hell are you doing here?"  
* * *  
  
"You know you're the only one who can tell us apart," was his only reply to her question. Deanna was in shock, the last person she expected to see here was him.  
  
"How did you find me?"  
  
"Were you trying to hide?" He was smiling at her now, hoping like hell that she would not find something to throw at him. "It wasn't that hard, people generate a lot of paperwork when they request a shore leave, it's not hard to track it down if you know how," he answered her question quietly he was beginning to feel uncomfortable under her intense gaze. "As for what I'm doing here, well I got a little time off and I thought.well I guess I thought I had some things I needed to say to you."  
  
"Some things, some things, Thomas I haven't heard from you in over two months and you think you can just pop into existence the middle of my shore leave and have a discussion."  
  
"I don't recall you trying all that hard to contact me Deanna," he snapped, wishing even as he spoke that he could take it back. The last thing he wanted was to fight with her, on tonight of all nights. "Deanna look I just want to talk, why don't we go inside and I'll make us some diner." Deanna did not move she just stood there trying to figure out exactly what it was she was felling from him. "Or if you prefer I could just stand out here until you stop being stubborn." He kept his voice soft and tried to hide his growing dismay, he had never taken into consideration the fact that she might not even speak to him. "All right," she whispered. "You can come in." She turned and walked through the door without looking back to make sure he was following. Tom stood out on the porch for a moment trying to calm his breathing and prepare himself for the hardest thing he was ever going to have to do in his life.  
  
* * *  
Deanna went straight to the small bedroom with out a word to Tom. As soon as the door slid shut behind her, she sat heavily on the large bed and began the Betazed relaxation breathing. 'What does he want' she thought. After a few moments, she felt composed enough to stand and began peeling the bathing suit, which was still damp from her last swim, off her. She quickly found a soft lilac colored dress in the closet, slipped it on, and brushed out the tangles in her hair. She gave her self a quick glance in the mirror, and deciding she looked as pulled together as she was going to get, under the circumstances, she walked back into the living room.  
  
Tom was sitting on the overstuffed white couch that sat in the middle of the tastefully decorated room. He had started a fire in the fireplace, and was now holding a glass of wine. If it had been anyone else but her Tom would have seemed relaxed, but she could feel the apprehension rolling off him in waves. Tom looked at her and a small sad smile touched his lips.  
  
"You are beautiful," he said quietly.  
  
"Thank-you."  
  
They both stood like that for a moment looking at each other, trying to organize all they wanted to say into coherent thoughts.  
  
"Tom."  
  
"Deanna," they both started at the same time, and then laughed nervously.  
  
"You go first," she said as she sat in the chair opposite the couch and tried to ignore his pang of sadness that she had not sat beside him.  
  
"I wanted to explain what happened, why I couldn't contact you," he paused and she nodded her head to encourage him to continue. It was a gesture she made many times in counseling sessions, but Tom Riker did not know that having never seen her in what Will referred to as 'counseling mode'. "I didn't want you to think that I was ignoring you, or that I didn't care anymore. I've had a lot going on these past few months, a lot to think about and well I just wasn't ready to talk about them until I got everything figured out."  
  
She wanted to ask him what he had figured out, but she was not sure she wanted to know. "You came all the way here to tell me that," she said with just a hint of a smile. "The Gandhi is almost a month away from here at warp six, that's a long way to travel for an apology."  
  
"Actually that's one of the things I wanted to tell you. I transferred off the Gandhi. Things just weren't working out very well."  
  
Deanna could feel that there was much more to the story then that, but she chose not to push it. "So where will your next posting be?"  
  
"Planet side, I'll be at a station near the Cardassian border." Tom spoke confidently, but Deanna knew that he was not happy about being posted on a planet. If there was one thing Tom had in common with Will it was their love of space travel. "It's been hard, getting back into the rhythm of Starfleet," Tom continued in a quite measured voice. "It took a while to get used to being around so many people everyday. It's funny I used to like being around people. You know big gatherings, jazz clubs, I just liked being around people, but when I got back from the science station it was different."  
  
"Tom it is perfectly normal for there to be a period of adjustment when you've spent so long by yourself. I think under the circumstances you've adapted very well.'  
  
Tom chuckled, "That is exactly what the Counselor aboard the Gandhi said."  
  
"What can I say; we recite our rhetoric from the same book. It's called how to annoy your patients in ten easy steps." Her attempt at humor was rewarded with the first genuine laugh she had heard from him in a long time.  
  
"I always thought counselors sounded to much alike for their own good," he said after he caught his breath. He looked at her then with open tenderness and Deanna could feel the intensity of his blue eyes burning into her. He stood up in one swift motion and covered the distance between them in one long stride. She expected him to touch her, but he did not, he just crouched down in front of the chair so that he was eye level with her.  
  
"God I've missed you. You don't know how many times I thought about you, how many times I wanted to hold you in my arms." They were so close, but Tom still didn't touch her. She could feel his desire, but something was holding him back. "Deanna I have done some soul searching, about who I am, who I want to be. It is weird to know that someone else is living your life, the life that you always wanted. I was so angry with him, for having my life, messing things up with you, just breathing. I didn't think I would ever have made the same decisions he had, especially where you were concerned, but the more I thought about it the more I realized I probably would have. As much as it kills me to say it, I probably would have done things exactly the same way, and I am sorry for that. I am sorry that he hurt you, I am sorry that I would have hurt you."  
  
Deanna opened her mouth to tell him it was not his fault, but he gently placed a finger on her lips to quite her. His touch caused her stomach to tighten, and she bit back the soft moan that was forming in the back of her throat. "Please let me finish," he said, and when she nodded, he removed his finger from her lips.  
  
"The time that we spent together on Betazed was the happiest of my life, even when you were arguing with me. All of it, not just making love with you, the talking, the arguing, and even hanging from that stupid tree," he smiled wistfully at the memories that made up their mutual past.  
  
The sexual tension that had invaded her body was quickly being replaced by a new kind of tension; she knew where this conversation was going. She felt distant, disconnected from her body, and it all clicked into place. She understood now why he had come all this way to see her, why he had gone to the trouble to track her down. She thought she was ready for this, thought she had prepared herself for the worst. Now that he was in front of her, with his emotions pouring into like a pitcher filling an empty cup, she knew she was not nearly as prepared as she thought, not even close.  
  
Tom had paused in his speech to watch the play of emotions on her face, silent tears began to fall down her cheeks, and he knew that she understood what he was trying to say. He opened his mouth to say the words, the words that she did not want to hear and he really did not want to say. This time it was Deanna who put her finger over his mouth to stop the words from coming. The disconnected feeling intensified, and she seemed to be watching from outside herself as she removed her finger from his mouth and quickly replaced it with her lips.  
  
She kissed him with a hungry desperation born of heartache and searing pain, and he returned the kiss in kind. With a passion, she barely thought herself capable of; she clutched him to her, and felt the gratification of his arousal against her. Somehow, they both ended up on the floor tearing at each other's clothing until their naked bodies touched, and fire spread through them. Tom's kiss became more fevered, and a primal hunger shone in his eyes that matched her own. Deanna touched his mind, and was drawn into the deluge of longing, desire, and sadness pouring from every fiber of his being. She took his emotions inside of her, just as she took his body, and feed them all back to him. With each thrust, the pressure mounted the physical as well as the mental. Neither noticed the bitter tears that flowed down both their cheeks, and mingled on their bare flesh. In that moment they were two people raging against fate, and the universe, at everything that stood between them, including themselves. The climax tore through both of them, leaving a white hot flash through their entwined bodies, and minds.  
  
"Imzadi," they cried out at the same moment, as if calling to each other from a great distance, a distance neither could cross.  
* * *  
The moon was just begging to set as Tom searched for his scattered clothes; he moved quietly casting frequent glances at the woman curled up in the bed. He could not even remember moving to the bedroom, but apparently, somewhere in between their fevered lovemaking they had found their way in here. The only sounds that had passed between them in hours was moaning and the one word that bound them together with gossamer threads, but not just the two of them, there was another whose very soul hinged on that word. Not so long ago Tom would have denied that his double still respected the magnitude of that word, after all he had left her, refused to continue a relationship with her. Now though he knew that it was possible to love someone with everything you were and still have to let them go, for he was about to do just that.  
  
He slipped into the other room rummaged around for the pants he had been wearing; he found them in front of the chair and began digging into the pockets. After fumbling for a few moments, he pulled out an envelope. He took a moment to rub his thumb over the smooth white paper of the envelope, his thoughts went back to the last time he had written anything on real paper, a poem for the very woman that slept in the other room. He placed the envelope carefully on the table and finished putting his clothes on.  
  
When he had dressed, he walked back into the bedroom and watched her for a moment as she slept. She was lying on her side facing him with her dark hair fanned out on the pillow behind her. He watched the rise and fall of her bare breast with every breath; he followed the curve of her body trying to memorize every nuisance. For one crazy moment, he thought about slipping back into bed and holding on to her for dear life, but he knew it would be wrong, for both of them.  
  
Instead, he leaned into her and kissed her gently on the cheek, "Good- bye Imzadi." He stood from the bed quickly so as not to lose his nerve, and walked through the house, out the front door, and into the dark night.  
  
When Deanna heard the front door close, she finally opened her eyes, "Good-bye."  
* * *  
Deanna had cried the rest of the night and finally drifted back into sleep after the sun sat well above the horizon. She slept for most of the day, and when she finally woke, she found the envelope sitting on the coffee table. Her name was scrawled across the top in his strong steady hand. She trembled as she slid the paper out of the envelope and began reading.  
Deanna,  
  
If you are reading this now it means I could not say the things I needed to say. You always could turn me in to a coward. I know how much you hate to say good-bye, and where you are considered, so do I. It is funny, I could say good-bye to everyone I have ever know, my Father, my home, old friends, and lovers, but not you never you, until now.  
  
I need you to understand why I am saying it now, why I have to let you go. It is not because I do not love you, and it is not because of my career, in truth Starfleet doesn't seem to mean as much to me as it used to.  
  
When I left the Enterprise I thought I could pick up right were I left off, not only with you but with Starfleet as well, but I couldn't things didn't feel the same, I didn't feel the same. I was still William T. Riker in my mind, but at the same time, I was not. I realized, after months of trying to be something that I could not be anymore, that I had to find my own path. I had to stop being William Riker and start being Thomas Riker. I cannot keep living my life in another man's shadow, even if essentially that man is me.  
  
I envy Will, not just because of his career, but because he got the chance to watch you become the beautiful, strong woman you are now. Even if your not lovers you are together, you have both grown together, shared you lives, and he has become everything to you that I wanted to be, that I guess we both wanted to be.  
  
With you I am still Will Riker, and I cannot go on like that. I hope you understand that in order for me to be my own man I have to let you go, as much as it hurts I know that I would never be able to find my own way as long as I held on to the past, and my past is you.  
  
I will never really be able to forget you Deanna, never really stop loving you, but I have to do this. I don't know if I will stay in Starfleet, I don't honestly know what I will do. I fell as if I am just starting out on a long journey, and I'm scared and excited all at the same time. I wish I could have started on this journey with out hurting you, but I think you have known all along what would happen. I am so sorry Imzadi, for everything.  
  
Good-bye.  
* * *  
Will stood in the transporter room waiting for Deanna to beam aboard. The last few months had been hard on the both of them, and he felt like a total jerk for avoiding her. He had missed her a great deal, it was hard not to go to her when he had a problem, not to sit with her in Ten-forward, or flirt with her at the weekly poker games. Now he just wanted everything to back to the way things were before Tom, he hoped they still could.  
  
"Sir," the transporter chief said, "there ready for transport."  
  
Will nodded and watched the platform as Deanna materialized there. The first thing he noticed was how beautiful she looked. She was wearing a long light blue dress that clung in just the right places; her hair was free of its normal clasp and hung down her slender back and shoulders. He stepped toward her and picked up her bag from the platform. "Hey, you look great. I guess spending a week at a beach agrees with you." He smiled at her hoping she understood his attempt at putting the tension behind them.  
  
She returned the smile with equal warmth. "I spent the whole week lying on the beach and being completely lazy. How could it not agree with me?" She nodded and smiled at the transporter chief in that way she had that turned any man with a pulse into a pool of quivering jelly.  
  
Will followed her out the door and down the corridor. "So you had a good time then?" He asked as they stepped into the turbo lift. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a sad almost wistful smile cross her face, but when she turned around to look at him, it was gone.  
  
"Yeah I had a good time." 


End file.
